


For a Smile

by wynnebat



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Cousin Incest, F/F, Harry Potter Next Generation, Love Letters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-02
Updated: 2012-10-02
Packaged: 2018-03-12 00:37:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3337778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wynnebat/pseuds/wynnebat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lily would do close to anything to see Roxanne smile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For a Smile

**Author's Note:**

  * For [autumn midnights](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=autumn+midnights).



> Written for lunalestrange4/autumn midnights in the [HPFC Fic Exchange](https://www.fanfiction.net/topic/44309/61441625/) & beta'd by cherryredxx!

_Dad, before you say anything, you should really know this is all Teddy's fault. I think that if you're going to be angry at anyone, you should be angry at him. He gave me the idea. Inadvertently, anyway. Really, don't look at me like that! I'm coming out to you properly, so you should at least try to listen with an open mind. Please._

_Now, where was I? It all began a few months ago when I heard Helvia Hollingberry, Roxanne's girlfriend at the time, say…_

.

"I can't believe I ever wanted to date you. You're the most bloody insane person I've ever met, let alone dated. I never want to see you again!" Helvia yelled, stomping down the stairs from the seventh year Hufflepuff girls' dormitory, her head turned backwards so that she could yell some more. All Lily could see of her head was her braided brown hair, swinging from side to side. When Helvia finally turned toward the common room, Lily saw the shock in her blue eyes firsthand. There was a group of at least five angry Hufflepuffs, wands out, glaring at her.

"What the hell was that?" asked Cole Jordan, Roxanne's best friend.

"I don't have to explain myself to you. Any of you," she snarled, glaring at the group. "I'm out of here. We're through."

Cole was about to go after her, but Lily pulled on his sleeve to stop him and ordered, "Go to Roxy. She's more important right now."

Lily watched Cole run upstairs while the group of would-be avengers dissolved, waiting for Roxanne to come downstairs. It was difficult to sit there and just wait, but Lily knew her presence wouldn't be as welcome as Cole's. He would comfort her in his stupid, Cole-ish way, and then Roxanne would come down and Lily would say hello and they would all go to dinner.

She was convinced Cole would help her through the break-up, so she returned to her book and waited. The words swam past her eyes as she wondered why exactly Helvia and Roxanne had broken up. They had been dating for months now, and Lily thought they were pretty serious. Roxanne sure talked about her a lot.

Lily couldn't stand Helvia, but she was admittedly biased.

The clock's hands turned from one in the afternoon to six in the evening, but Roxanne still hadn't come downstairs. Slowly all the Hufflepuffs shuffled off to dinner, but the two Lily wanted to see were absent. Worst of all, Lily couldn't go upstairs to check up on them, as the Hufflepuff stairs wouldn't let a non-Hufflepuff up them.

Biting her lip, Lily decided to resort to desperate measures.

"Anyone still here?" she called. No one answered.

She took her wallet out of her robes, a beautiful snakeskin one her dad got her for her birthday, and took out the pair of Extendable Ears any good Slytherin kept for situations like these. Then, after looking around a second time, she whispered, " _Wingardium leviosa_!" and pointed her wand at one ear. The other she held in her hand. When the rubbery string between the ears tightened, she whispered, " _Extendium_!" and put the ear in her hand against her ear.

She immediately wished she hadn't. On the other side of the door, only feet away from the other ear, Roxanne was crying. Not the few tears Lily had seen here and there, the tears she sometimes let out after failing an essay or walking into an invisible door. These were the real tears, the horribly loud ones, where she half-wheezed and choked and spluttered. Lily's heart clenched. She couldn't believe what she was hearing. Roxanne, the most composed of her female cousins, was breaking down.

And Lily couldn't do anything to help. She stuffed the Extendable Ears in her pocket and slipped out of the Hufflepuff common room. Walking to the Great Hall, she thought about all the revenge schemes she could plan out for Helvia. To be honest, she didn't want to go to dinner, but she needed to go to see what people were saying about the breakup and control the gossip as best as she could.

"You're late, Potter!" Aurelia Parkinson called, moving aside and patting the seat next to her. A plate automatically appeared, so Lily sat down and prepared to be interrogated. "I bet you have a story."

"I could just be running late," Lily argued, piling up food on her plate.

"But you haven't been running, and I heard that those two lovebirds broke up. Dish." Parkinson usually wasn't interested in the gossip surrounding Lily's many cousins; she claimed it was repetitive and boring and had too much to do with the whole world's enduring adoration of Harry Potter. But she always liked break-up drama.

Lily wrinkled her freckled nose. "Don't be such a gossip monger. I was there. Helvia called Roxanne some horrible things."

"So it was her fault?"

"Of course."

Dad taught her never to lie, but omitting the truth wasn't lying, per se. Besides, one could never be honest in Slytherin House. It was either adapt or be thrown into a pit of poisonous snakes.

That would be a good idea for revenge, Lily decided. Her father would never have to know.

.

_I was speaking metaphorically, of course. And a want for revenge is a Slytherin thing. It's practically genetic. I've never actually taken vengeance on anyone, Daddy._

.

Lily waited for Roxanne to go back to being her smiling and cheerful self, but she never did. She stopped going to the library because Helvia was always there, she stopped seeing her friends, and she stopped coming to most of the meals. She also stopped her daily ritual with Lily, where Lily would meet her before dinner and they would walk to the Great Hall together, talking about everything and nothing. Roxanne always had a good excuse, but everything amounted to "I don't want to see Helvia" or "I'm depressed" in Lily's head.

She was most worried about the last one.

Lily tried comparatively normal ways of cheering Roxanne up, first. She asked her to come to Hogsmeade with her, something Roxanne usually enjoyed doing. They would usually visit Honeyduke's and Uncle George's shop, and then go to Madam Puddifoot's for a laugh. Roxanne refused.

"I'm sorry, Lily, I just have so much homework," she said, not meeting Lily's eyes. And then she vanished up the Hufflepuff stairs again. Lily was beginning to hate those stairs.

She tried telling jokes and passing along funny gossip, which seemed to make Roxanne feel better for a little while, until she saw Helvia again. Lily was beginning to hate Helvia more than anyone on earth.

Cupcakes, books, and secrets didn't do the trick. Neither did perverted comics or cheerful cards.

By the end of the third week after the breakup, Lily was pulling her hair in worry while sitting in a booth at the Three Broomsticks, waiting for Teddy. He was late, as usual.

"Lilypad!" Teddy cried, giving her a one-armed hug and sliding into the booth across from her. "How's it going?"

"Terrible," she answered honestly.

Teddy then sat up straight and listened to her entire story. There was a reason he was her favorite brother, and it had a lot to do with his listening skills. He never treated her like a child, never tried to tell her to stop growing up so fast. He might have been a Gryffindor, but Lily adored him unconditionally.

"Did you ever find out why they broke up?" Teddy asked.

"No. Roxanne won't say anything and Helvia's moved on. But the consensus around school is that it's Helvia's fault," she answered.

The corners of Teddy's eyes crinkled that little bit. "Is it?"

"Yes, it is," Lily agreed. "What should I do about Roxanne? I'm worried about her."

"You need to raise her self-confidence."

"But _how_?"

"Cheer her up. Cheerlead her accomplishments. Compliment her. Things like that."

Of course, Teddy wasn't the best advice giver. He wasn't even vaguely good at it, but he did make Lily feel like she was on the right track and gave her an idea for cheering up Roxanne.

Lily vaguely remembered a Hogwarts-aged Teddy going through a "cheer people up and at the same time get laid" phase, which she discerned from some applications of Extendable Ears involved telling just about every girl at Hogwarts, "You're looking beautiful today." It didn't get Teddy laid, but it did raise his likeability with the female population.

But Lily couldn't compliment Roxanne in person like Teddy could. It might raise some eyebrows or rumors. They were both interested in women, so overt compliments just weren't done, never mind that they were friends and cousins and that Roxanne would never be interested in Lily anyway.

From there, the anonymous note idea was hatched.

The first note Lily sent to Roxanne was simple, even though she spent hours writing it. The message needed to be sweet and kind, but also not creepy or stalker-sounding. After coming up with the perfect one, she wrote it on a piece of Aurelia's plain white parchment with one of Roxanne's own pens.

She didn't touch the paper and disguised her handwriting manually, without any special spells. Her father was an Auror, after all. She put it in the official Hogwarts mail pouch in the Owlery, where the caretaker would attach it to an owl when he became available.

.

_Don't look at me like that. It was for a good cause. What? You can't stop bringing your work home with you! I've learned so much from it! Er, I meant, well... Let's get back to the story._

.

She slept fitfully, feeling both anxious and hopeful, and finally went upstairs to the Great Hall around six in the morning. As she was the first student there (Sandthorn didn't count, as he practically lived in the Great Hall), the house-elves made her breakfast favorite foods appear on the Slytherin table. She reminded herself to go to the kitchens and thank them sometime. Aunt Hermione would lecture her if she didn't, and Lily didn't think she could survive another house-elf's rights spiel.

Roxanne arrived about an hour later, when Lily was on her third glass of pumpkin juice, and an owl perching outside the Great Hall immediately flew toward her. Lily looked away, unable to watch Roxanne read her letter. It was too embarrassing. Then Roxanne waved her over and Lily immediately regretted her decision not to look at Roxanne's face as she read it. She would have known what she thought of the letter.

"Good morning, Roxy," she said with a hopefully innocent smile. "Did you sleep well?"

Roxanne shook her head. "Never mind that. Read this."

Lily took the letter in her hands and glanced down at it, pretending to read the note. Mostly she was just fighting to control her blush. Thankfully, her red hair camouflaged the red tips of her ears.

_Dear Roxanne,_

_I'm not sure how to say this, and I'm probably going to do it badly anyway, but I just wanted you to know that I love your smile. It lights up my day like it's Christmas, and I feel bubbly and happy whenever I see it more than once in a day. It's beautiful._

_Sincerely,_

_Paddy_

When she wrote it last night, it had seemed perfectly innocent. A _friendly_ way to cheer a _friend_ up. But in the harsher light of day, it read like a love letter. It didn't announce love, but it made it seem like the writer was in love with Roxanne. Lily wasn't, even though the letter held only the truth.

"Oh," she said. She gave it back to Roxanne. "What do you think?"

Roxanne had a thoughtful expression. "I think Helvia never said anything like that." With that, the topic was closed, and Lily thought the letter hadn't helped at all. Then Roxanne stood up, stretched, and gave a small smile for everyone in the Great Hall to see.

"Let's go paint our nails, Lily. We haven't done that in a while."

Lily smiled, even when she ended up with yellow and black fingernails. She had her Roxanne back, after all.

Roxanne admired her green and silver ones and said, leaning back on one of the Hufflepuff common room's fluffy armchairs, "I've been a bad friend these past few weeks. I'm sorry."

Lily quickly shook her head. "Don't think that! It's all Helvia's fault, anyway."

But the way Roxanne looked down guiltily and bit her lip told another story, one Lily was determined to uncover. If only she could find out why Roxanne was so sad, she could fix her. Or try to, anyway.

.

_I tell you some things, Dad. I don't purposely keep secrets from you. I just can't always tell you everything because I'm still figuring out my life and my feelings. Or rather, I was back then. I'm sure of what and who I want now. I always was. I just didn't realize it at first._

.

Lily tapped her fingers against the desk in her dormitory, trying to come up with ideas for why Helvia had broken up with Roxanne.

According to the combined information of Lily's friends and discreet acquaintances, Helvia Hollingberry was seventeen years old, a Gryffindor, bisexual, and a mostly-EE student. Her parents had minor positions within the Ministry's Department of Child Services. Besides being a terrible girlfriend, she also had some anger management and jealousy issues. She ensnared Roxanne in her clutches in the late spring of last year when they were both sixth years. They saw each other often over the summer and sat on the Hogwarts Express together.

Then their relationship got fishy. Lily hadn't noticed anything at the time, but they began getting in more arguments, according to Aurelia. Small things at first: a sharp word in the hallway, a canceled Hogsmeade date. Then they began arguing even more until, all of a sudden, they stopped. Aurelia thought they either made up or entered into the silent fighting phase. Lily wasn't sure. She couldn't believe she never noticed these things. She always thought Roxanne and Helvia had the perfect relationship. How could she have been so blind?

Then they broke up in early January, right after winter holidays, and Roxanne spent the rest of the month moping. Lily sent the letter in early February, and Roxanne was happy for a few days, until the teachers began putting up Valentine's Day decorations.

Over the next few days, she watched both Helvia and Roxanne, deciding on a plan of action. The easiest way to get information would be to confront Helvia. She couldn't go to Roxanne directly or to any of Roxanne's closer friends because they would tell Roxanne. But a confrontation with Helvia chaffed against every Slytherin instinct she had. Lily didn't like confrontations at all. She was the quiet, nice, cute little snake. Just because she had poisonous fangs didn't mean she wanted to use them.

Helvia would slip the story to someone someday. Lily just had to keep her ears open.

.

"She says your cousin slept around on her," Aurelia said that morning as they walked to Potions together.

Lily clenched her fingers into angry knots, but kept her face free of expression. "She did, did she?"

"Hmm. Should I expect an announcement to her funeral?" Aurelia asked. Then she smirked. "Or to your wedding?"

"Shut up, Parkinson," Lily muttered. She wasn't interested in Roxanne in that way. She was just trying to protect her favorite cousin, who she had always considered one of the nicest, prettiest people she knew. She couldn't let Helvia crush all that with her stupid rumors. A confrontation was in order.

Then she saw Roxanne in the hallway, her head down, almost running toward the Hufflepuff common room. Helvia wasn't worth it. Potions wasn't worth it, either.

"Tell Slughorn I'm sick," she told Aurelia and rushed after Roxanne. "Take notes for me!"

When she finally caught up to her, she put a hand on Roxanne's shoulder. "Are you okay?"

Roxanne looked terrible. The rumors must have started the previous night while Lily was busy writing her next secret letter to Roxanne. It was supposed to be delivered that morning, but Roxanne had missed breakfast as well. Her eyes were red and had that wild look Pepper-Up Potion always caused and her hands were shaking inside her pockets. Even the way she answered, "I'm fine," was shaky and unbelievable.

"Come on," Lily said, taking Roxanne's hand in hers, hoping she could somehow transmit comfort through touch. Seeing Roxanne like this was worse than just about anything. She pulled her along to the Hufflepuff common room, which was thankfully empty. The two underclassmen there were easily cowed out of the room by her glare. "Sit," she ordered. "I'll be right back."

Lily came back in under two minutes with hot chocolate and hard white chocolate, Roxanne's favorite comfort foods, according to Cole. "Not as good as Grandma's, but they're still good," she said, putting them in Roxanne's hands. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Not really," Roxanne replied before summoning a blanket from upstairs. "I just… I wish I never dated her at all."

"We learn from our mistakes," Lily said, going for encouraging, but it came out flat.

"Tell me something I don't know," Roxanne said, snorting.

She took Roxanne literally in an attempt to take her mind off Helvia. "Parkinson, my roommate, can't stand snakes. She's terribly guilty about it, because as a Slytherin she should adore them. I think they're kind of cute."

Roxanne nodded, drinking the hot chocolate. "I've never asked, but are you and Aurelia Parkinson really that close?"

"She's my best friend," Lily answered.

"Then why do you call her by her last name?"

Thinking for a moment, Lily said, "It's… a form of respect, I guess. By calling her by her last name, I'm saying I respect where she comes from, her roots. I'm saying that I respect and accept her family and her history. I wouldn't call her by her first name unless we were family or there was someone else with the same last name nearby."

"Oh." Roxanne wrapped her blanket around herself, and said in an odd sort of tone, "You don't call me by my last name."

Lily smiled. "Could you imagine me calling all of the cousins Weasley? In the middle of a family gathering? Scorpius is bad enough with his attempts to distance himself from us by using last names. It's a bit funny. You're family… and you're one of my close friends."

But even as she said it, Lily knew it the complete truth. Roxanne was her cousin and her friend, but she also had a beautiful smile and a stunning personality. She was a year older, and Lily looked up to her. She was also drop dead gorgeous, all long legs and long hair and a runner's body. Lily had to look away from her at that moment, because if she kept looking, she would stare. When did that happen? When did she start wanting to never have to take her eyes off Roxanne? Why was she even trying to figure out Roxanne and Helvia's relationship?

All she had to do was tell Cole and he would jinx Helvia, no questions asked. He was Roxanne's best friend, the pseudo-cousin that Roxanne had lived next to all her life. He could do all this better than Lily.

Then why did she want to be Roxanne's closest person, the one she went to before anyone else?

Lily closed her eyes. She didn't like where this was going. She didn't like it at all. It had to stop _right now_.

"Are you okay?" Roxanne asked, her soft voice music to Lily's ears.

The door banged before she could answer and Cole walked in, calling for Roxanne. "Hey, I have a letter for you since you missed breakfast." He handed it to Roxanne, who quickly tore the envelope and read through it. She didn't hand it to Lily this time as she and Cole read through it.

As he finished reading it, Cole whistled softly. "Damn, someone's in love with you."

"Stop," Lily wanted to yell. She wanted to tell him, "Don't say that. It's not true. It can't be true." She wanted to order him to shut up, to stop his stupidly perceptive comments.

"Do you really think so?" Roxanne asked.

Lily dared a look at her face. She looked so hopeful, so sweet.

Lily was screwed.

"Maybe," Cole said. "Probably something more like attraction, though. Want to go look for him or her?"

They invited her to come with them, but Lily shook her head. She had to get away from Roxanne, to think about her feelings. When they left, she grabbed Roxanne's blanket and settled under it, contemplating love.

Was this what love felt like? It was awful. She didn't understand how people could look for this feeling their whole lives. She couldn't even begin to discern why they would even want it.

It hurt, this feeling. It caused her emotions to go from one extreme to another. It caused her to become irrational. It caused her to put Roxanne's happiness over her reputation. If it ever became public, that she wrote her cousin love notes, it would be the biggest scandal since Dominique became a Goyle.

This love made her stupid and selfless. It made her think that if she had to do it over again, even if it ever got out, she would do it in a heartbeat, just for that expression of pure happiness on Roxanne's face when she got a letter.

But along with happiness, Roxanne had an expression of curiosity when she read the letter. She needed to circumvent Roxanne's curiosity somehow so that no trail led back to Lily.

After classes, she met up with Roxanne and Cole at the Hufflepuff dinner table and asked, "What if the anonymous writer is a guy?"

"Hmmm," Cole said. "Tell me more."

She sat down and stole Roxanne's cup of pumpkin juice. "Well, I mean, everyone knows Roxanne isn't interested in men. So what if he thought that the only way to make her fall in love with him was to send her love letters?"

"But I'm not going to fall in love through these letters," Roxanne said with a frown. "They're sweet, and it makes me unbelievably happy that—" She blushed. "—someone feels like this for me, but I can't fall in love with someone I don't know."

A part of Lily wanted to say, "Challenge accepted!" Another part wanted to insist that these were letters of friendship, not romance. Another just wanted Roxanne to be more open with her love, to fall in love with the writer. Lily ignored all these thoughts and excused herself to the Owlery. She had a letter to write, and this one would be a purely platonic one.

That night, she snuck out of Hogwarts through the tunnel under the Whomping Willow. Technically, she wasn't supposed to know about it, but when her father regaled his kids with highly edited stories of his childhood, she knew there had to be a grain of truth to them. So she spent an entire month her first year finding how to crawl under the Whomping Willow. There was a knot she could poke with a stick, but she also nourished it with special fertilizer for years until the tree became used to her presence.

She patted the trunk and ran until she reached the open night air. Reaching the Hog's Head, she threw her winter hood up and bowed her head, making sure her identity would be safe. Teddy was already there, thankfully not late this time. He had probably been worried by her letter.

.

_Of course you shouldn't be worried about the rules I've been breaking, Dad. I'm a good girl at heart._

.

"I have a problem," she said as she sat down next to him, needing his arms around her shoulders and the friendly contact.

"What is it, Lilypad?" Teddy ordered them drinks and handed her the non-alcoholic one.

She frowned at him, but drank it anyway. She wanted something alcoholic to give her courage to tell him, but she knew she'd spill too much that way. Quickly, before she lost her nerve, she said, "I'm in love with someone I shouldn't be."

"Ah." Teddy nodded. "I know."

Shocked, Lily spluttered, "How do you know? I didn't know until yesterday."

"I'm all-knowing," he answered smugly. He became serious after Lily jabbed him in the side. "Tell me, who is your favorite cousin?"

"Roxanne."

"Why, though? Compare that to how often you see her and how close you two are."

Teddy should have been in Ravenclaw, she thought morosely. He was right. Her feelings didn't make sense if they were looked at in a platonic light. Their families didn't live nearby. They mostly interacted at family gatherings or at Uncle George's shops or at Grandma and Grandpa's. She and Roxanne weren't the closest when they were growing up. The year age difference felt like eons back then.

Then Roxanne went to Hogwarts and they grew even farther apart, until Lily went to Hogwarts too. Roxanne was the first person after her immediate family to accept her placement in Slytherin, and shadowed Lily her entire first year to make sure she wasn't bullied.

Lily never told her she wasn't successful because she liked the way Roxanne cared for her. Besides, Lily eventually made friends in her House. Then it wasn't Roxanne who shadowed Lily, it was Lily who chased after her. She went to the Hufflepuff common room often enough for the Hufflepuffs to accept her as one of their own, and walked to dinner with Roxanne every day. She invited her to Hogsmeade once a month, and spent the entire day talking to Roxanne.

But all that wasn't enough for her to feel so protective of her, so possessive of her time. It wasn't enough for her to start hating Helvia as soon as she started dating Roxanne. Lily didn't even remember why she started hating her. All she wanted was Helvia gone at the time.

"I can't believe I never noticed," she said.

"We're most blind to our own feelings," Teddy said gruffly, squeezing her tighter.

.

Two letters turned into three, then into six. Lily didn't know why she wrote them anymore, because Roxanne was over Helvia completely. Somehow, the letters just had a therapeutic effect on her. She liked being able to write down what she felt. Of course, that didn't explain why she sent them. She could write to Roxanne in a journal, or burn the messages after writing. Maybe it was the soft expression on Roxanne's face when she read them, or the way she smiled for an entire day after she got one. She just looked so beautiful that Lily couldn't help but write more, and fall in love even more as well.

The next time she saw Helvia alone, it was already late March. Helvia had probably stopped caring about Roxanne completely, Lily decided, and wouldn't mind sharing why they broke up. She sat down at her library table and brightly said, "Hello!"

"Potter," Helvia acknowledged warily. "What can I do for you?"

That didn't make sense. She shouldn't be wary of Lily, not so early in the conversation. Lily never even bothered to take revenge on her, though she heard Cole gave her a horrible case of rotting toenails. She smiled wider and tried to be as friendly as she could. "I just wanted to ask you something, about, well, how you and Roxanne broke up. I don't mean to invade your privacy at all! I was just there in the common room when you two had your fight, and I've been meaning to ask if you were okay. I know we aren't close, but I thought I should still check."

"Can the bullshit, Potter," Helvia replied, going back to her homework.

That was very not good. "I'm sorry?" Lily asked.

"You want to know why we broke up. So ask it. I dare you."

Curse her inability to keep her nose out of Roxanne's life. "Why did you two break up?"

Helvia smirked, and it wasn't a Slytherin smirk. It was wicked, and what she said next was even worse.

"It was because of you."

Lily couldn't breathe. "What do you mean?"

"Find that out on your own," she said, getting up to leave the library and taking her things with her.

"Please tell me!" Lily called after her, but Helvia didn't take pity on her.

All she got was a loud, "Shhhh!" from one of the other tables.

Her feet took her to the Hufflepuff common room without her knowledge, and she barely realized she asked for Roxanne until one of the underclassmen brought her down. Could she have really destroyed Roxanne's relationship? She felt terrible for the fact that while she felt mostly sad and guilty, there was a part of her that didn't care how Helvia and Roxanne broke up, and was just happy that they had.

"Lily? What happened?" Roxanne asked when she noticed Lily come into the room.

"I was talking to Helvia. She said you broke up because of me," Lily said, her voice shaking a little. Apparently, talking to Helvia also destroyed her control of what she should and shouldn't say.

"Oh, Lily," Roxanne said, pulling her into a hug. "Don't listen to her."

Lily stiffened. "You didn't say I had nothing to do with it." She pulled away and waited, but Roxanne said nothing. Lily didn't even care that they were making a scene. "How?"

Roxanne rubbed her temples and practically collapsed onto the nearest couch. "You really don't want to know, okay? You didn't ruin our relationship. It was Helvia who did. It wasn't your fault."

Lily sat down across from Roxanne and waited for a more detailed explanation, rubbing her hands together with nervousness.

Roxanne continued, "I guess it was because we're friends, you and me. It didn't matter so much last year and during the summer because we got together after finals and we were always alone on dates during the summer. But then school started again and… Helvia was jealous of our friendship. We're both into girls and we get along much better than she and I ever did. She thought there was something going on. It wasn't so bad at first, but she kept getting jealous over every little thing, until the day when I just finally told her that she should break up with me so that I could date you instead if that's what she wanted." Seeming to realize what she said, she quickly amended, "I didn't mean it. I was just tired of it all."

Roxanne sounded honest, but there was one thing that Lily didn't understand. "If you were fighting so much, then why were you so upset over the breakup?"

"It wasn't exactly about that. Helvia just made me face something I didn't want to think about."

Oh. That was interesting. "About me?"

"Kind of, yeah," Roxanne admitted. Lily really hoped she was talking about what Lily wanted her to be talking about, because otherwise she was going to make a fool of herself.

"I love you, Roxanne," Lily said.

"I know?" she asked, a little confused, but mostly sad. The same sadness Lily felt when she realized she loved someone who could, not only never love her back, but loved her in a familial way. It was like a big bolt of lightning struck, charring everything but one truth: Roxanne didn't feel just a familial love toward Lily.

Roxanne smiled at Lily, but even a child would have thought it was false. "So we're good?"

"Not yet," Lily said. It was time to be a Gryffindor because Roxanne wouldn't accept anything less. She had to put herself on the line and make Roxanne see that their love could happen. "I tried to cheer you up when you became depressed, do you remember? But I couldn't find the perfect way. So I thought that maybe I could… I could send you letters of friendship that could make you feel better. So I did."

"You're Paddy. But why would you—I thought it was a guy. You told me it was a guy."

"It wasn't a guy. But Cole was right. It was someone who's in love with you," she choked out, watching Roxanne's expression. "Everything I wrote was true."

"Really, Lily? Because I love you too. Though I think you figured that out, you Slytherin." Roxanne was grinning by the end, and the only thing Lily could do was kiss her, because she looked too amazing not to be kissed. For the first time in her life, she lost herself in a haze of happy emotions, kissing someone she loved completely. It didn't matter that Roxanne was a girl or her cousin. She was so happy that nothing else mattered except Roxanne's hand in her hair and her lips against hers.

.

_Sorry, you didn't need to hear that part. Let's just say we kissed. Very platonically, but in a romantic, innocent way. No tongue at all. Okay?_

.

From that moment on, Lily was an unofficial Hufflepuff and their relationship was an open secret in the Hufflepuff House. It was also the happiest few months of her life, even if she couldn't talk about that happiness with any non-Hufflepuff except Teddy. She didn't even tell James and Albus since they would tell her parents.

It was like she saw everything with new eyes. Potions wasn't just that boring class before lunch; it was the class right before she saw Roxanne. Yellow and black didn't look gaudy together; they looked absolutely adorable, especially when Roxanne wore them on her tie.

Their relationship was rocky through the weeks right before Roxanne's NEWTs, but they got through them. The only problem was what to do over the summer.

"I could visit you," Roxanne suggested. "Or you could visit me."

"Wouldn't our parents think it's weird that we're suddenly seeing each other so often?" Lily asked.

"We can say we strengthened our friendship over the year."

"You're absolutely brilliant. C'mere." Lily smiled and pulled Roxanne into an empty compartment on the Hogwarts Express, locking the door behind them.

.

_We played cards. From two feet away from each other._

.

They succeeded keeping their relationship secret until the middle of August, when they got careless out of the realization that they wouldn't see each other again until winter holidays. Lily invited Roxanne over and they cuddled together on her bed, thinking of the upcoming year.

"I heard most long-distance relationships fail in the first few months. So all we have to do is get through that, and we'll be fine," Lily said, not feeling fine at all.

"We'll make it work," Roxanne assured. "We love each other, so we have to make it work."

Lily smiled like she always did when Roxanne said she loved her. Love was a wonderful thing when it was reciprocated. She leant in for a kiss, and Roxanne gave it to her, sighing softly. They tried to reassure themselves through the kiss that all would be fine. That they would somehow be together forever.

It was at that moment that Lily's dad walked in, wanting to ask her if she needed to go to Diagon Alley before school started.

"Bloody hell, _Lily_!" he bellowed in surprise, dropping what he was carrying out of shock.

.

_But I guess you already know that part. Don't be angry, Dad. With me or with her. I'm in love with her. The full,100 percent, want-to-be-with-you-forever kind of love that you and Mum have. I'll understand if you don't want to see me for a while, or think it's gross, or can't look at me anymore, or—_

_Oh. You still love me? That's good. I was never really worried anyway, honestly._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Complete; no sequel planned.


End file.
